Working in Series

WORKING IN SERIES CHRISTOPHER C.M. LEE AND KAPIL GUPTA / SERIE ARCHITECTS

Architectural Association London

CONTENTS 2

GOING AGAINST TYPE Brett Steele

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WORKING IN SERIES: TOWARDS AN OPERATIVE THEORY OF TYPE Christopher C.M. Lee

CEILING / VAULTS 16 44 54

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THE TOTE MESWANI HOUSE XI’AN 2011 INTERNATIONAL HORTICULTURAL EXPO MASTERPLAN ARCHITECTURE AS A MENTAL HABIT: NOTES ON THE METHOD OF SERIE Pier Vittorio Aureli PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIUM: TYPAL CONVICTION OF SERIE Sam Jacoby

PLAN / CIRCLES 76 88 102 114 128

BLUE FROG ACOUSTIC LOUNGE XINTIANDI FACTORY H PARCEL 9, HX URBAN CENTRE BOHÁCKY RESIDENTIAL MASTERPLAN THE PRACTICE OF CONJECTURES AS PROJECT Laurence Liauw

FACADE / GRIDS 134 142

V OFFICE RU�INOV MIDDLE INCOME HOUSING

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GOING AGAINST TYPE AN INTRODUCTION TO SERIE Brett Steele

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The work of Serie renews one of the decisive critical projects of architectural theory and practice from the 1960s and 1970s: that of type and typology. To say the least, this renewal is something of a surprise, especially given the rapid decline of typological discourse amidst the worst excesses of 1980s historicist post-modernism. Serie reject the cultural nostalgia exhibited by so many of their generational peers in relation to architectural history (and, with it, the frequent prioritising of appearance over form). And they have none of the digital determinism of today’s parametricists, who assert that scripted, relational design platforms are the only legitimate basis for arguing correct architectural form. Instead, they seek something else entirely: to pursue architecture through the renewal of already known disciplinary or critical projects.

Serie’s contemporary insight owes much to their intelligent combining of the most advanced design platforms with a decidedly self-aware understanding of recent architectural culture: they have realised that no other recurring modern project within architecture has a greater capacity to renovate design theories than architectural typology, with its focus on the inherently iterative, serial aspects of architectural production itself. On the surface, such an assertion goes against the grain of our era’s fascination with mass-customisation and nearly infinite cross-disciplinary collaborations, which leave little room for historical or typological precedent.

Over the past 15 years, architecture has lost much of the historical knowledge by which it formerly understood not just itself, but the whole world around it. Architecture’s greatest forms of knowledge and expertise have always been those related to its own disciplinary history. For 2,000 years, from the Ten Books of Vitruvius, historical knowledge was embedded within a decidedly iterative and serial embodiment of architectural design. By early modern times, this had become codified in treatises describing formal architectural typologies of all kinds, from the arrangement of institutional structures to the proportioning of walls and decorative elements.

The revolutions related to early 20th-century modernism were founded, of course, on an outright antagonism to all of this, and most especially to historical strategies for the organisation of buildings. Centuries of disciplinary intelligence were stripped from the design language, tools and rhetoric of architecture and replaced with a surreal range of functionalist accounts of all kinds, which sought to validate modern architectural form.

It was against this historical backdrop that the architectural interest in typology was rekindled in the writings of the late-modern generation, most notably by Aldo Rossi in his 1966 Architettura della città . Rossi’s text offered a generational corrective to the excesses of architectural orthodoxy, which by the middle years of the 20th century had become entrenched and virtually incapable of expressing contextual, let alone historical, coherence between modern architecture and the city. Rossi argued that building typologies possessed a unique capacity for creating such coherence: what is more, they achieved this through an act of iteration, not reproduction, which allowed architecture to understand itself (and not just the city) as a historical reality. This conceptual breakthrough within modernism was huge, if short-lived.

Throughout the 1970s the writings of Rossi and others on typology ended up being morphed into various kinds of contextualism that sought above all a justifiable fit between architectural form and its real (or imagined) historical setting – a condition that quickly devolved into a weakened architectural historicism. However, 1978 saw the publication of two genuine manifestos that pointed to the productive relevance of typological thinking. Collage City, by Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, pursued a typological assessment of the classical versus the modernist city along a traditional, planimetric form of analysis focusing on Nolli’s Rome and Le Corbusier’s Paris. Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York, on the other hand, presented a deeply typological assessment of modernism in the form of a distinctive sectional reading of the generic urban block comprising the Manhattan grid. While differing in significant and contrasting ways, both texts demonstrated the considerable instrumental capacity of typology to serve as the basis for architectural experimentation.

But what has changed since the writing of these texts, and what makes a return of critical theories of type and typology so unexpected today, is the definitive globalisation of architectural culture during the past three decades. (Indeed, one might say that by the 90s Koolhaas’s critical interest in the brute realities of globalisation, like the generic plan or ‘bigness’, testified to his generation’s loss of faith in older, historical/critical architectural projects.) Chris Lee, Kapil Gupta and their young collaborators at Serie work out of offices in London, Mumbai, Beijing and Chengdu, demonstrating in the most straightforward way the spectacular global working realities of the generation of architects coming of age today.

This book could also be seen as both a testament to and effect of this condition, documenting a substantial body of work achieved barely three years after the founding of this young practice – something that could scarcely be imagined without the kinds of distributed, networked and collaborative practices that Serie have so clearly embraced. What is clear, however, is that this reality is no longer seen as a subject for sustained reflection, but is instead treated as merely a working condition around which larger, genuinely disciplinary, architectural interests are pursued.

The work of Serie is an attempt to renew architecture’s legitimacy through a retrieval of the working concepts, language and history of architectural serialism, that is, through the recognition that an architectural project is only ever the latest in a series of similar undertakings – either in one’s career, or in the history of the profession more generally. To a remarkable degree architectural knowledge is only ever learned one project at a time: this blunt (and for many architects, brutal) condition of architectural life is something Serie are well aware of, to the point that their projects are compelling not only for their formal accomplishment but also for the various ways in which they talk to one another, as iterations or minor deviations of shared design operations or techniques. Add to this level of self-awareness the fact that so many of the projects are themselves the result of complex organisations based upon the repetition of simple, primary shapes (circles, slabs, openings) or formal operations (rotating, branching, tiling), and what becomes obvious is that this is the work of young architects who are interested not only in redefining architectural types but in architectural form itself, pursued here via various kinds of iteration, seriality and differentiation. That these design operations are exactly those iterative actions biased by scriptable, controllable digital design software demonstrates the larger potential of Serie’s renewal of type and typology. The promise that history and technology might yet again productively co-exist within the culture of contemporary experimental architecture is exactly what is suggested by this early work. Serie are believers in architecture’s own and distinctive ability to transform itself – not once and forever, but over and over, in a world where architecture is best understood as a serial form of knowledge, experience and ambition.

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Far from rules being injurious to invention, it must be said that invention does not exist outside rules; for there would be no way to judge invention. – Quatremère de Quincy Architecture is an artistic and not a scientific discipline.

Architectural activity has its own object of knowledge, which is different from the object of science. The object of architectural knowledge is architecture itself, as it has been historically constituted. It does not consist of abstract functions but of concrete forms. – Alan Colquhoun

WORKING IN SERIES TOWARDS AN OPERATIVE THEORY OF TYPE Christopher C.M. Lee

What is the common currency of architecture in the postFordist city? And what is the disciplinary knowledge that enables the effective production and comprehension of architecture in a globalised world?

It can be argued that globalisation is not a new phenomenon but it cannot be denied that the rate of space–time compression has increased rapidly in the past two decades, affecting the nature of architectural production in the context of the city and raising the above questions.1 To illustrate the point: I was born in Malaysia, of Chinese origin, a British citizen, living in London. I teach at the AA – arguably the most international school of architecture. My partner, Kapil Gupta, is Indian, based in Mumbai and we founded Serie London/ Mumbai three years ago. Serie now has offices in London, Mumbai, Beijing and Chengdu and our projects are spread across Xi’an, Hangzhou, Beijing, Chengdu, London, Bratislava and Mumbai. Unlike offices that have amassed a large portfolio and a clear ‘style’ prior to expansion, our practice was global from the start, in very modest and local settings. With time differences, distance and cultural, political and social nuances as obstacles, the most pressing issue from the outset was the need for an operative theory that would not only create a basis for a consistent body of work but also enable the practice to engage in the varied cultures and locations. This operative theory, I believe, should fall within architecture’s disciplinary knowledge and should be a generic knowledge – to sustain comprehension across the various offices, time zones and cultures – but must also be capable of offering very specific and explicit architectural responses. The processes adopted have to be logical in experimentation rather than personal.

1 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Blackwell, 1990)

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For me, this operative theory is type – albeit an understanding of type and typology that has to be renewed.

Thus the work of Serie revolves around the notion of type as an operative theory and a disciplinary knowledge that transcends national and cultural borders and is dedicated to the search of dominant types, both as ideas and models that are simultaneously generic enough to overcome differences and specific enough to engage and index the cultural, social and political nuances of its host. At the core, it is an attempt to enable architecture to regain a certain degree of political agency in an age of pluralism.

TYPE AS IDEA AND MODEL The concept of type was formally introduced into architectural theory by Quatremère de Quincy in the early nineteenth century. For de Quincy ‘The word type presents less the image of a thing to copy or imitate completely than the idea of an element which ought itself to serve as a rule for the model’.2 For Quatremère, type is an element, an object, a thing, that embodies the idea. Type is abstract and conceptual rather than concrete and literal. Drawing upon Plato’s theory of art, he goes on to define this notion of idea more as an ideal, and this idea – that must serve as the rule to the model – compels the creative process to imitate the idea and to strive for the ideal.3 Thus, working from type involves the process of reasoning and abstraction. The model, on the other hand, is concrete and is the complete thing.4 Stressing this difference warns against the biggest pitfall of using type in the design process: namely, that an over reliance on precedent leads to repetition and direct copying and excludes originality and invention. Therefore, if the type is an idea, its material

2 Quatremère de Quincy, ‘Type’ in Encyclopédie Méthodique, vol. 3, trans.

Samir Younés, reprinted in The Historical Dictionary of Architecture of Quatremère de Quincy (Papadakis Publisher, 2000).

3 Consistent with the discourse of art and architecture from the mid eighteenth to mid nineteenth century that delves into the question of architecture’s origin, as exemplified by Laugier’s primitive hut, Quatremère de Quincy takes nature’s laws and principles as the ideal and urges architects to be the artificers of nature.

4 Quatremère de Quincy elaborates further the difference between type and model with the following statement: ‘The model, understood in the sense of practical execution, is an object that should be repeated as it is; contrariwise, the type is an object after which each artist can conceive works that bear no resemblance to each other. All is precise and given when it comes to the model, while all is more or less vague when it comes to the type.’

manifestation and expression can take on many different forms. Thinking through type allows the architect to reach the essence of the element in question, rather than using it as a model to be copied. This affirmation for the idea draws attention to type as a primarily cultural and aesthetic construct. It is abstract and constitutes a form of critical reasoning.

The model on the other hand can be traced, almost at the same time, to the way Durand treats the notion of type and has been commonly associated more to typology as a design method. In his Précis, Durand attempts to find a systematic method to classify various genres of buildings and to distil them in a set of diagrams.5 Durand proposes that new types for the recently emerging urban condition can be created through the adaptation of these diagrams to specific sites, responding to its constraints. It can be argued that the danger of Durand’s process of abstraction reduces building precedents to a set of geometric diagrams and removes from type the very idea proposed by Quatremère. Nevertheless, the notion of type as model, represented graphically as diagrams, introduces precepts that are fundamental to working typologically: precedents, classification, taxonomy, continuity, repetition, differentiation and reinvention. Although the process begins with a precedent type, the fundamental goal of working typologically is to surpass the precedent type whilst maintaining its irreducible traits or DNA in the transformed or reinvented type. Taken together with Quatremère’s notion of type, this continuity between past and present, norm and exception, allows the practice of architecture to locate its role in the discursive formation of the knowledge and history of architecture. Seen this way, to work typologically is to analyse, reason and propose through things which are of the same type, thus considering them in series. Working in series allows us to understand the shared traits between things – be it architecture or the city – and to harness the embodied and cumulative intelligence of that series into architectural projections. Furthermore, this serial consideration emancipates the idea of type from a fixed ideal without displacing the need for an ideal. As Argan has pointed out, ‘The birth of a “type” is therefore dependent on the existence of a series

5 Jean Nicolas Louis Durand, Précis of the Lectures on Architecture, trans.

David Britt (Getty, 2000). Durand’s diagrams primarily capture the structural elements of various building types, comprising a layer of grids that denotes both structure and geometric composition.

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of buildings having between them an obvious formal and functional analogy’.6 This assertion also leads to the crucial fact that new types can be detected as much as they can be surpassed, hence enabling a design process that is syntactic and discursive in equal measure.

Central to this proposed operative theory of type is the utilisation of the diagram. As Jeffrey Kipnis succinctly writes, ‘diagrams underwrite all typological theories, as evidenced, for example, in the catalogues of Durand’.7 Ever since the utilisation of the diagram, from the bubble to syntactic formalism and the all pervasive parametric indexicality today affirms its continued instrumentality in architectural experimentation. It can be argued that this indexical obsession in academia and in some speculative practices for the past two decades draws from the same ambition to institute the rigorous system of architectural knowledge afforded by the diagram. However, the focus for this continued obsession has largely been around the generation of novel form – with today’s latest incarnation of parametric design. It would be far too exhaustive to cover the various differences above in this essay but it is sufficient to state that for Serie the diagram and its processes serve to carry the typal imprints of a precedent type and to evolve them into new configurations that will form a series of possibilities. The utilisation of the diagram and the notion of type as a model is well equipped to answer the question ‘how to …’ but is inadequate in the face of the question ‘why do…’. It is therefore the coupling of the notion of type as idea through Quatremère with that of the model that will enable architectural experimentation to address both its internal disciplinary problem and its wider existential question. The idea here for us is the critical reasoning of type tied to cultural, social and political considerations. The domain where these considerations are manifested in all their material complexity, as tangible architecture, is the city itself.

The city as the artefact and repository of civilisation enables us to understand – through its dominant types – our cultural, social and political struggles. The ideas of our architecture are driven largely by the idea of the city and, where possible, our ambition is to produce architecture that is relevant for the city.

6 Giulio Carlo Argan, ‘On the Typology of Architecture’, trans Joseph Rykwert in Architectural Design no.33 (December. 1963): 564–65.

7 Jeffrey Kipnis, ‘Re-originating Diagrams’ in Peter Eisenman Feints (Skira, 2006).

TYPOLOGICAL CONFLICT AND CONCEIT We begin each project in our office by locating a typological conflict. This contention articulates Quatremère’s notion of type as ‘the idea that must serve as the rule to the model’ – the intellection of the project towards action. This typological conflict is often exposed and conceptualised through the dialectical organisation that structures the complexity of contemporary relations. From the programmatic organisation of rooms to the dispersion of architectural artefacts in the city, typological conflicts embody the different conflicting interests that are constantly renegotiated in the contemporary conditions of heterogeneity. This analysis and reasoning attempt to go beyond the demands of a design brief that a service professional will diligently meet and push the practice of architecture into a conjectural discipline. For instance, our Xi’an Horticultural Expo proposal was at odds with the brief that called for the sprinkling of ‘ornamental’ greenhouses in a newly proposed park and instead submitted the idea that a large architectural artefact was needed to form a new focus at the periphery of the city – anchoring its future growth and countering the ancient city wall at the centre of the historical city (figs 1 & 2). The formulation of an alternative agenda, beyond the given parameters and confines set out by a client brief can be seen as an act of resistance to the banal forces of the market. However, this position of resistance does not seek to negate the reality of practice but attempts to carve out a position of autonomy for alternative projections and meaningful alternatives within the same milieu.8 In this way, the internal discourse of architecture’s disciplinary knowledge acquires a political agency through its direct engagement with the forces external to its concerns.

THE DEEP STRUCTURE OF TYPE Architecture in practice cannot remain as a form of critique.

The idea of type – the reasoning that governs the principles of the proposition – requires the model as the concrete

8 Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture within and against Capitalism (Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, 2008). The argument set forth by Aureli centres around the possibility of a critical architecture that is propositional and projective by revisiting the theoretical positions and projects of Aldo Rossi and Archizoom through the lens of the autonomia movement and its thinkers like Mario Tronti.

abstraction of that principle. The model, unlike the idea, can be graphically represented as the deep structure of the type.

This deep structure can be best understood in two ways.

Firstly, the deep structure is the diagram that indexes the typal imprint of the precedent type. Secondly, the deep structure is the irreducible structure that gives rise to organisation. The unity of organisation and structure is where form, tectonics, construction and materiality cohere into the aforementioned typal imprint. At this juncture, type is pre-architecture and exists as a diagram of pure serial potential. The projects developed by Serie so far can be classified into three groups of deep structures, each exploring an irreducible typal imprint and are paired up with a corresponding orthographic plane of exploration that gives rise to the following: plan/circles, facade/grids and ceiling/vaults. The diagrammatic approach adopted here as a process of abstraction is not to search for novel geometries or form – common in the practice of interpretation of the graphic space of convoluted diagrams.

Instead, type as a diagram is both a diagnostic and prognostic tool, an index of organisational and structural performance that carries a specific idea or strategy. In many instances, the deep structure is trans-scalar and independent of building use – evidenced in the Blue Frog Acoustic Lounge, Parcel 9 HX Urban Centre and Bohácky Masterplan (figs 3, 4 & 5) – providing a consistency in organisation and an open system.

The recent retreat of academia and speculative architectural practices from the problem of organisation as the agency where architecture can exert influence on how spaces are contested, negotiated and consensually settled is unfortunate. This retreat in favour of the obsession with the figure of the building (icon) and the faciality of the skin of the building (envelope) further reduces the territory of influence for the practice of architecture – the former whimsically forces organisation into a figured envelope, turning architects into building stylists and the latter relinquishes organisation altogether to developers, space planners, retail specialists or building service consultants and focuses solely on the proliferation of components on the envelope. In contrast, architecture as a practice has at its disposal the disciplinary knowledge to deploy organisational intelligence that can fundamentally engage the complexity of spatial relations between disparate user groups, the natural and artificial environment, the urban fabric and its building mass – conditions that typify the disorienting heterogeneous environments 7

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as a result of space–time compression.9 Organisational structures – or in Le Corbusier’s digitally unassisted times, the plan – is the generator of other inventions in architecture. It is this that gives rise to other formal variations, the Plan Libre (organisation) and Domino House (structure) that enabled the free facade (surface/envelope). The same could be said of the Assembly Building in Chandigarh, where the organisation of the figured function in plan eliminated the container–content relationship thus freeing the facade for experimentation. Thus Le Corbusier’s brise-soleil – as an invention – was perhaps inspired by the freedom afforded by a new organisational structure first and foremost, rather than by the need for a considered climatic response .10

We learn from Rossi that type is ultimately independent of programmatic failure.11 That is to say, the deep structure of type – its organisational structures – is not genre or programme specific and as such is open to scalar shifts. This is evident in most projects of OMA; take for instance the Y2K House and Casa da Musica, Porto. The former is a house, the latter a concert hall, but both share the same organisational structure and form and are thus of the same type. Both projects carry the idea of exhibiting the concealed spaces of social intercourse and the model enables this through the framing of the void (the family room of the Y2K House and the performance hall for Casa da Musica) and projecting the void to the exterior, heightening the tension between exhibitionism and voyeurism. This transcalar programmatic immunity is evident in all our projects. One such series utilises the circle as a figure and organisation, giving rise to a range of typological possibilities: an undulated lounge and restaurant that behaves like a theatre (void as stalls), the vernacular Hakka Tulou House recast and framed within an undulating landscape (void as courtyards) and the plot boundaries as an undulating regulator of difference (void as regulators of intensive difference), (figs 6, 7, & 8). In another series, the explorations of the ceiling – an often undervalued architectural element and plane for design – as a volumetric definer finds its expression in the structural paraboloid vaults that are part wall, part bridge and part greenhouse in the

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Xi’an Horticultural Expo Masterplan (fig 9). The ceiling as the primary volumetric definer is articulated by the branching structure in The Tote, whereby a secondary volume is created within an outdoor volume, enveloped by the site’s majestic rain trees. In the Meswani House, intersecting vaults enable the loose arrangement of a very large house, eliminating long corridors in favour of punctuated light wells and courtyards as circulation rooms (fig 10).

Organisational structures as the deep structure of type offer the required pliability to engage with the specific and increasingly complex and heterogeneous demands of contemporary life. The demands are often contradictory and are reflected in the impossible briefs that architects work with – a big house that must be compact and intimate (Meswani House, fig 11), an old factory that must now house a restaurant, bar, lounge, dance floor and performance space in one and the same volume (Blue Frog Acoustic Lounge, fig 12); a disused factory that must be conserved, made prominent again and yet accommodate a new insertion of built floor area four times its existing footprint (Xin Tian Di Factory H, fig 13).

The grids in the Ružinov Middle Income Housing and V-Office projects are utilised not only for the demonstration of part to whole harmony but for the seeding of differentiated organisation behind a regular facade. In Ružinov, a project that calls for the construction of low cost apartments, the placement of projecting loggias in a 1:2 bay forces the displacement of the living room of apartments along the loggias. This facade completely disables the stacking of identical apartments and as a result generates 56 unique apartment layouts (fig 14). Despite the high degree of customisation of the layouts (at no considerable increase in cost), the deep structure of the facade/ grids achieves two aims. The first denies the rampant random facades that typify mass housing of late, where the conspicuous expression of different apartment units on the facade as singular instances (and as a celebration of individuality) denies any sense of order and coherence and negates the very notion of collective housing.

Following on from this, the second aim is to provide for a high degree of differentiation in apartment layouts where these differences cohere into a collective whole that is ordered and legible.

9 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Blackwell, 1990).

10 Alejandro Zaera Polo, ‘The Politics of the Envelope’, Volume 17, 88.

11 Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (MIT Press, 1984).

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IDEAS FROM AND FOR THE CITY Our interest in the city as the overt site for architectural knowledge is more evident in our recent larger projects, namely the Bohácky Residential Masterplan, Xi’an Horticultural Expo Masterplan, Parcel 9, Guiyang and Xin Tian Di Factory H. This proposition that the city is the domain of critical reasoning leading towards typological ideas is based on our realisation that the dominant type embodies the idea of the city. From Cerda’s housing blocks in Barcelona, Georgian and Victorian terraces in London to the skyscrapers of Manhattan, cities can be understood, described, conceptualised and theorised through their own peculiar dominant types. Through Rossi, we learn that a singular building as an element of ‘permanence’ is able to act as the repository of a city’s history, construction and form within its type. For Rossi, type is independent of function and therefore pliable, as the city’s repository.12 Thus, to understand these types is to understand the city itself. This possibility of conceptualising and theorising a city through a singular dominant type also led Koolhaas to mythologise the idea of Manhattan as the culture of congestion – all embodied within the Downtown Athletic Club.13 Here, the skyscraper is recast as the apotheosis of metropolitan culture, a building type made up of a stack of autonomous, richly varied programmes coexisting in a singular tower, made possible by the introduction of the elevator. Today, the reliance on a singular type to envision and brand new cities is evident in the iconic high-rises of Dubai and Shanghai. Here, type is no longer utilised or valued as a formative element of the city but is deployed to lubricate the marketing machinery of capitalism, where novelty and excess

12 Rossi’s idea of the city rests in his assertion that the city can and should be understood through its architecture as a whole and that the city is a gigantic cumulative construction over time, embodying its history and memory. He cites Palazzo della Ragione in Padua as an example of an architectural artefact of ‘permanence’, able to absorb different uses through time. This suggests that its deep structure (structural elements that give rise to organisation) is independent of function and is an element of permanence in the city.

This reading of the city enabled Rossi to use the fragments of historical urban archetypes as set pieces for a present context, denying a linear and singular historical narrative, yet maintaining an ambiguous continuity with the historical city. See ‘The Structure of Urban Artefacts’,ibid.

13 Rem Koolhass, Delirious New York (010, 1994). See also Eisenman’s description of the instrumentality of the Downtown Athletic Club as a didactic diagram for the subsequent OMA projects of the Bibliothèque de France, Agadir Convention Centre, Jussieu Library and Seattle Public Library in Peter Eisenman, Ten Canonical Buildings: 1950 – 2000 (Rizzoli, 2008)

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is the prerequisite for a city’s global status. Thus, the idea of the city finds its ultimate expression in the dominant type.

What is revealing about the architects who wrote about the city from 1966 to 1978 – namely Rossi in The Architecture of the City, Venturi, Scott Brown & Izenour in Learning from Las Vegas and Koolhaas in Delirious New York – is that they went on to produce more significant buildings than masterplans and that the city is treated not so much as a site that must be transformed by masterplans or propositions of similar scale after the initial readings, but most crucially as an idea for a projective architecture. Thus, the ideas of the city, once conceptualised, can be abstracted and transposed as architectural ideas. This is evident in Rossi’s seminal works, the Gallaratese housing and Modena Cemetery, where the idea of architecture is understood through a singular architectural artefact. That is to say, the dominant type is and can still be a mnemonic structure for the city. Similarly, the defining section of the Downtown Athletic Club became the didactic diagram for Koolhaas’ subsequent projects where the traditional clarity of the figure/ground and building/city idea is recast as an architectural idea based on the denial of the ground. In these projects, the neat divisions between functional zoning, site and building, ground, solids and voids, are dismantled to conjure up the culture of congestion.14 Similarly, emerging cities today offer us many fertile ideas to rethink normative architectural ideas. It might be the possibility that a single dominant type as a punctuator, independent of intended programmatic effectiveness could regenerate a city through excessive novelty and contextual contrast, as in the case of Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao; or, in the example of the airport as a type, where it has mutated and expanded to a city in its own right. The Aerotropolis offers, among many others, an idea of architecture as a new type of mat building, a type with extreme flatness and depth of programmatic diversity – a hyper-large architecture as a city.

Our proposal for the Xi’an Horticultural Expo Masterplan is perhaps the clearest attempt to draw upon the proposition outlined above. Going beyond the brief for a cluster of dispersed greenhouses, exhibition and performance halls and other associative amenities, our proposal attempts to rethink the idea of centrality on the periphery of cities.

Learning from the ancient city wall of Xi’an, the clear figure of 14 Ibid, 200–08.

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the fortified city wall still persists today as the quintessential architectural element that anchors the entire city and forms the city core despite the city’s growth beyond its metropolitan border. This figure as a diagram of power and organisation suggested the necessity of centrality to anchor any new growth on the city’s northeast periphery where the competition site is located (fig 1). Our proposal re-imagines the city wall as a 1 km-long wall and bridge that houses five climate zones. Each climate zone is experienced sequentially as different episodes of greenhouses strung between the existing historical city and the growth of a future city at its periphery.

Similarly, the utilisation of an inhabited plinth as a podium to accentuate a disused factory in the Xin Tian Di Factory H introduces the idea of a punctuator as a strategy to anchor a masterplan. This idea rests on the possibility that a new urban core can be anchored by a clear and defined artefact rather than the common strategy of utilising hyperdense buildings that accumulate pedestrian flow. The use of the plinth here absorbs the required new floor area for the project but releases the void of the factory hall relatively unmolested by the increase in floor areas, thus turning this large and unique void into a new public space and attractor for the masterplan (fig 15).

The Bohácky Residential Masterplan was an opportunity for us to rethink the question of coherence and difference in a large-scale development. In this masterplan, intended to guide the development of a number of villas by eight other architects, our first concern was to avoid an architectural theme park for designers. Our proposal uses two regulating strategies to achieve a condition of unified plurality: the first strategy utilises an undulating hedge that acts as a green ‘wall’ that delineates each plot as ‘rooms’ (fig 16).

The second strategy relies on the use of the courtyard type that offers wide multiple variations of pin-wheeled rooms and establishes a typological grammar for other architects (fig 17).

In the process, our project rethinks the boundaries as walls that frame individuated difference whilst offering an overall coherence.

To summarise, the idea of the city – with all its antecedent intellections – and the idea of architecture are interchangeable and transposable if the city is understood and conceptualised through its dominant type. It is a given that the contemporary city is an increasingly heterogeneous environment, and its ability to accommodate multiple and 11

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often conflicting demands is fundamental. It is this accommodation of differences (as opposed to producing novel forms for the sake of difference), that the deep structure as an organisational framework as well as a common grammar for the multitude can lend architectural propositions and conjectures a degree relevance. This operative theory that works serially through the idea and model – critically confronting the received principles that underwrite the architectural act and harnessing the cumulative intelligence of the type in question – revalorises the practice of architecture as a speculative discipline with a political agency. And it is this constant engagement through the disciplinary knowledge of architecture, via type, that will enable architects to ultimately answer the question ‘why architecture?’

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THE TOTE 2007–09, MUMBAI, INDIA

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Being primarily a conservation and adaptive re-use project, the challenge of The Tote was two-fold. The first was to avoid the recreation of the historical image of the project and the treatment of the precedent type as an idealised image of an imagined past. The second was to utilise a deep structure that could nevertheless situate the project in this particular setting.

The design brief for The Tote called for the conversion of a series of disused buildings within the Mumbai Racecourse into a banqueting hall, restaurant and bar. The conservation guidelines required the preservation of the roof profile for three-quarters of the buildings and full conservation for the remaining quarter.

The interesting aspect of the site, however, lies not in these colonial buildings but in the open spaces covered by mature rain trees. These spaces are shaded throughout the year by the trees’ large leaves, allowing almost the entire programme to occur outdoors. Our proposal attempts to continue this idea of a continuously differentiated space, with no clear boundary, into the envelope of the conservation building.

We proposed a new structure within the old building envelope that would articulate a series of arches that in turn would induce a vaulted ceiling. This articulated ceiling as implied vaults would then act as programmatic captures, defining appropriate volumes under the conservation envelope. The deep structure adopted here is that of a branching-structure, acting both as a volumetric definer and structure to hold up the roof.

The progeny of the branching structure along the longitudinal section of the conserved building is differentiated in its growth along the transverse section. This reorganises the old buildings with new dining programmes. Therefore each dining programme (wine bar, restaurant, pre-function and banquet facilities) is captured within a different spatial volume, defined by the variable degree of the branching structure. The structure branches into finer structural members as it approaches the ceiling. When the branches touch the ceiling, the ceiling plane is punctured with a series of openings corresponding to the intersection of the branches with the purlins and rafters. These openings become light coves and slits.

As a whole, the project attempts to bring together the spaces that are already defined by the trees and spaces within the envelope of the building, not through the direct copying of nature, but as Quatremère de Quincy puts it, to imitate the principles that govern the working of nature.

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n of 75mm ht, m c.c spacing

typical T-section of 75mm ht, 1200mm c.c spacing

n of 75x75mm oof structure)

typical I-section of 75x75mm (roof structure)

d false ceiling, 600x600mm roof stucture

patterned gypsum board false ceiling, fixed to G.I framework at 600x600mm c-c fixed back to roof stucture

8mm thk m.s., of satin white epoxy paint

built up I-section of 8mm thk m.s., finished with two coats of satin white epoxy paint

m thk m.s.solid s. plates fixed on either side

built up section of 25mm thk m.s.solid bar with two 8mm thk m.s. plates fixed on either side

inum angle as azing beading

20x20mm thk aluminum angle as glazing beading

white marble um strip in-lay

20mm thk agglomerated white marble with 3mm thk aluminum strip in-lay

made of 8mm thk m.s. plate

built up column (Col. A) made of 8mm thk m.s. plate

lised exposed with 3mm thk m strip in-lay

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25mm thk specialised exposed aggregate flooring with 3mm thk aluminum strip in-lay

XI’AN 2011 INTERNATIONAL HORTICULTURAL EXPO MASTERPLAN 2009, XI’AN, CHINA COMPETITION 2ND PRIZE

Despite our strong desire to win this competition, the opportunity that the site presented led us to rethink the idea of centrality in a city like Xi’an, and compelled us to go beyond the considerations outlined in the design brief – an intellectual adventure, a business risk.

Our proposition addresses two questions: how does the historical city of Xi’an expand beyond its historical centre without dislocating itself into a peripheral condition, and how can the historical elements of the city be relevant in regulating this expansion? The project rethinks the horticultural masterplan, not as a landscape design or architecture that looks like landscape, but as a large architectural artefact, continuing the tradition of city-making in Xi’an.

Although the competition brief called for the design of a greenhouse and associated facilities, our proposal reimagines the role that a horticultural expo can play in seeding and regulating the growth of the city of Xi’an. Our proposal rests on the possibility of using a single architectural artefact to create a new centrality on the periphery of the city, consolidating its peripheral splinters and bridging the existing city and its future growth.

LEARNING FROM XI’AN It is often assumed that the idea of the city is in opposition to the idea of landscape and nature. More often than not, with landscape architecture projects worldwide today, we are witnessing the endless proliferation of architecture that literally looks like landscape. Our proposal challenges these two tendencies. The history of the city of Xi’an, in particular its city walls, is the starting point for our project. Through this, three strategic ideas are derived as a principle for our proposal. The first attempts to revalidate the tradition of city-making in Xi’an, and to show that elements of the historical city can be relevant and compatible with a horticultural expo park. The second principle rests on the insistence on clarity, where a simple, clear and legible architectural structure can act as a powerful organisational element for an expanded territory many times its scale. The third is contrast, where architecture’s pure form and geometry is set in contrast to landscape and nature, without altering the latter. In this way, their contrasting beauty is reinforced.

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PARCEL 9, HX URBAN CENTRE 2008, GUIZHOU, CHINA

mad

概念总平面图 Master Plan

Guiyang Hua Xi Urban Centre

In 2008 Serie was invited along with nine other young architectural practices from across the globe to participate in the design of a new urban centre in Guizhou. The masterplan, developed

by MAD Beijing and Tongji Studio 6, envisioned autonomous buildings surrounded by nature – in retrospect, perhaps the only strategy able to accommodate the different architects in the absence of stringent design guidelines.

Our allocated site, Parcel 9, is the first parcel in the south cluster of low-rise buildings, set in contrast to the tower cluster on the north, as intended by the masterplanners. Our proposal attempted to rethink the courtyard house in the context of high-density communal housing and to reconsider the synthesis of a legible figure with the surrounding landscape. From this, it draws together two ideas, one typological, the other from the indigenous landscape of Guizhou. The project begins with the typal transformation of the Hakka/Tulou house, with its circular courtyards, proposing a collectively shared circular courtyard that binds together a series of smaller private courtyards – the focal point for the proposed SOHOs (Single Occupier Home Offices), a new live/work type. With its clustering of courtyards, the communal housing is conceived as an amalgamation of different degrees of private and shared spaces cohering into a legible whole. The placement of the multiple courtyards creates a double facade in all the rooms – one facing the private courtyard, the other facing the shared courtyard – capitalising on the views towards two ends of the site: the mountain and the valley.

The overall envelope of the live/work clusters presents itself as three ‘peaks’ that contain the typological imprint of the Hakka/Tulou house. Binding these peaks is the gently undulating public ground, opening up vistas towards the valley of the site and also framing the needle-mountains of Guizhou from the valley. This act of framing the landscape also occurs at multiple levels – from the public ground to the shared courtyards to the double facades of the rooms – and is akin to the landscape scroll paintings of the Song Dynasty. In these paintings, the mountains are presented from a succession of viewpoints, captured as parts and yet presented as wholes.

HX Urban Centre Masterplan, Guizhou, China

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